Teachers from across Africa urged the continental bloc to halt the privatisation of national education systems today. Unions affiliated to the Education International (EI) federation pressed the African Union (AU) to stop the spread of sordid tin-shack schools funded by the world's richest man. The EI statement, issued in the Ethiopian capital and seat of the AU Addis Ababa warned: “we are witnessing a shift away from education as a public good,” with “a reduction in education budgets and increased privatisation of education.” “This is not the Africa we want,” said EI Africa Committee Chair Christian Addai-Poku, referring to the AU's 'Agenda 2063' plan. “Quality education for the public good is an indispensable condition for the development of our continent and the realisation of the full potential of all its people.” The teaching unions criticised the rapid growth across the continent of ‘low-cost’ private schools, which they said were “notorious for empl...

Guest post by the Vice-Chancellor of the Johannesburg Communist University The US assault on Venezuela is part of something bigger. It is part of an attempt by the USA to restore the position it had in the 1950s (when this writer was a child). This is the full meaning of “Make America Great Again” (MAGA). MAGA is not a withdrawal from the world, but it represents a US-led colonialist attempt to repossess the world. In the pursuit of its megalomaniac goals the USA is putting out mass-scale misdirection and misrepresentation, mixed with crude frankness. The USA sends mixed messages. Those of us who are to be the losers have to work hard to gain a clear picture of what is happening, and of what can proceed to happen in the near future. For Africans and for the once-called “Tricontinental” former colonial countries, the USA’s project, which is a bipartisan (Democrats as much as Republicans) project, represents an intended reversal of the “independence” movement that swept th...

The Hispanosphere was interviewed by news website Sputnik International on Thursday January 31, about the latest attempted coup d'etat in Venezuela. Here is the original transcript. What do you know about the ongoing coup attempt in Venezuela? Who is Juan Guaido, and what is his relationship to US intelligence services? Who is backing the coup and what's going on there? Like a lot of wealthy Latin Americans, Juan Guaidó went to university in the US. He studied “governance”, which is about telling people how to run their country.  Guaidó appeared on the political scene in Venezuela just after that, about 2007. For years before that the opposition had been taking money from the National Endowment for Democracy, which sounds like a charity but is really part of the US State Department. If you know the history of the NED, it took over the CIA's old job of channelling money to opposition and regime-change forces in other countries. Guaidó is from the Popular Will party, ...